Certain words of the clairvoyante, whom she had once visited with Irene Tidmarsh, she had never been able to forget, and of late they had haunted her anew.
“Beware of the written word....”
Elsie burnt all Morrison’s letters to her, and asked him to burn all those that she wrote him.
Gradually these letters that passed between them grew to be the most important factor in her life.
Elsie, who had detested writing, now desired nothing so much as to pour out her soul on paper, and the limitations that she found imposed upon her through lack of education and the power to express herself made her angry.
Again and again she asked Morrison in her letters to take her away, and after a time his steadfast refusals bred in her mind the first unbearable suspicion that her passion was the greater of the two. Her letters became wilder and wilder.
Sometimes she threatened suicide, or gave hysterical and entirely imaginary descriptions of scenes with her husband; sometimes she expressed a reckless desire for Horace’s death, or asked if she could “give him something” unspecified. These phrases, to a large extent, were meaningless, but Elsie frantically hoped by them to impress upon Morrison the extent of her love for him.
When he got back from the North of England they met surreptitiously.
A certain café in a small street not far from Elsie’s home became their rendezvous. Sometimes Morrison was able to get there in the middle of the day, but generally he came at about five o’clock, and they had tea together. Very occasionally they met early in the afternoon and went out together.
Each meeting was entirely inconclusive, save in exciting Elsie almost to frenzy and reducing young Morrison to further depths of despondency.